Traxex
"She is never where she is supposed to be. She is always exactly where the trouble is."
Background
The ranger's trade is patience. Traxex did not receive that part of the education. Where others in her craft learn to wait, to watch, to read the wilderness before moving through it, Traxex learned only the second half: the moving. She is exceptional at it. She kills cleanly, efficiently, at range, from angles that should not be possible for someone who never stopped to calculate them. She is considerably less interested in whether she was supposed to be there at all.
Her skill is not in question. It has never been in question. What the party continues to negotiate with, in varying degrees of frustration and reluctant affection, is everything that comes attached to it.
The Killing Kind
There is a difference between a ranger who scouts and a ranger who hunts. Traxex is the latter, without apology and without much interest in defending the distinction. Scouting requires stillness; she has none. It asks you to be patient with information, to gather it quietly and return with something useful for people who will use it to make plans. Traxex is not a planner. She is a finisher.
Her bow finds its mark because she does not hesitate between deciding to fire and firing; the two things happen at the same time, which is to say they happen instantly. In a party that contains a dragonborn of considerable strength, a paladin who radiates intent, a half-elf who moves like a rumor, and a sorcerer with access to the Weave itself, Traxex is still reliably the first to draw blood.
She is also, reliably, the first to be bleeding. The same speed that makes her lethal makes her a target before anyone else has finished assessing the room. The fastest to kill; the fastest to die. She has accepted this arrangement with a pragmatism that the rest of the party finds less reassuring than she intends.
A Subplot All Her Own
Give the party a town and they will explore it with some degree of purpose. They will talk to people, take on what needs taking, gather information, spend coin at the right establishments. Traxex will be somewhere else entirely. Not lost, not exactly. She has a talent for finding the one alley, the one tavern backroom, the one suspicious exchange happening in the wrong part of the market, and inserting herself into it before anyone has thought to say wait.
She does not plan to get into trouble. She moves toward motion the way water moves toward open ground: naturally, without deliberation, with complete indifference to where it leads. What she creates in these moments is less a distraction and more a second story running entirely parallel to the party's first one, complete with its own villains, its own stakes, and its own near-catastrophes. The party will find out eventually. They always do.
The Party She Has Not Claimed
There is a question the party has stopped asking aloud, which is whether Traxex can handle herself. She usually can, up to a point. The more persistent question, the one that hangs over every where is she moment, is whether she will need them before she can reach that point. The answer, often enough to be a pattern, is yes.
And when the answer is yes, they come. All of them. This is not something Traxex acknowledges directly; she would be visibly uncomfortable if anyone made it a point of discussion. But she knows. The party arriving in whatever alley or backroom or catastrophe she has stumbled into is not a surprise to her. It is simply what happens. She is theirs, even if she has not said so, and they are hers, even if she treats the fact like something she found rather than something she chose.
Nero and Traxex
Nero XXI does not hide his opinion of Traxex's habits. He considers her recklessness a form of immaturity: the inability of someone who clearly knows how to fight to learn how to think. He is not entirely wrong. He is also not entirely fair. What Nero reads as carelessness is, in Traxex, something closer to compulsion; she cannot stand still because standing still feels like disappearing, and she has no interest in disappearing on anyone else's schedule.
His frustration tends to land on her directly and with a sharpness she returns in kind. The animosity runs both ways and neither of them is especially subtle about it. It does not prevent them from functioning. In the field, Nero's discipline and Traxex's instinct are less opposed than they appear from the outside, and both of them are practical enough not to let a personal disagreement become the reason one of them does not come home.
Known Traits
- Ranger
- Sharpshooter
- Favored Enemy
- Nimble
- Glass Cannon
- Troublemaker
- First to Bleed
The Question This Chapter Must Answer
She is the fastest member of this party. That speed is her greatest quality and her most consistent liability, and there is no version of Traxex in which those two things come apart. The question her chapter must answer is simple and unkind: can she be fast enough to stay ahead of the consequences she creates for herself? Or will her bow strike true one final time in a fight she picked alone, in a room no one thought to look in, before anyone could come?
Notable Moments
Entries will be added as the chronicle unfolds. Record the deeds, and the disasters, that should not be forgotten.
Bonds & Relationships
[Record Traxex's relationships as the story unfolds. Note especially: her ongoing friction with Nero, and whoever she has dragged into her parallel storylines.]